Afro-Eurasia encompasses 84,980,532 square kilometres (32,811,167 sq mi), a little over half the world's land area, and has a population of approximately 6 billion people, roughly 86% of the world population.[6]

The World Island: a term coined by H.J. Mackinder and used in geopolitical contexts.[7] Mackinder defines the World Island as the large contiguous landmass, technically excluding islands such as Great Britain.[8] "Afro-Eurasia" generally includes those islands usually considered part of Africa, Europe and Asia.

Today, Africa is now joined to Asia only by a narrow land bridge (which has been split by the Suez Canal at the Isthmus of Suez) and remains separated from Europe by the Straits of Gibraltar and Sicily. Paleogeologist Ronald Blakey has described the next 15 to 100 million years of tectonic development as fairly settled and predictable.[9] In that time, Africa is expected to continue drifting northward. It will close the Strait of Gibraltar around 600,000 years from now,[10] quickly evaporating the Mediterranean Sea.[11] No supercontinent will form within the settled time frame, however, and the geologic record is full of unexpected shifts in tectonic activity that make further projections "very, very speculative".[9] Three possibilities are known as Novopangaea, Amasia, and Pangaea Ultima.[12] In the first two, the Pacific closes and Africa remains fused to Eurasia, but Eurasia itself splits as Africa and Europe spin towards the west; in the last, the trio spin eastward together as the Atlantic closes.

^"Only the inflow of Atlantic water maintains the present Mediterranean level. When that was shut off sometime between 6.5 to 6 MYBP, net evaporative loss set in at the rate of around 3,300 cubic kilometers yearly. At that rate, the 3.7 million cubic kilometres of water in the basin would dry up in scarcely more than a thousand years, leaving an extensive layer of salt some tens of meters thick and raising global sea level about 12 meters." Cloud, P. (1988). Oasis in space. Earth history from the beginning, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 440. ISBN0-393-01952-7